Abstract
This chapter will extend the model developed in the last chapter to cover thoughts and truth and then use the model to give an account of belief ascription, analyticity, modality, and some other topics under the framework of No-Self Physicalism. Section 4.1 will describe the structures and functions of thoughts in individual brains. Section 4.2 first characterizes truth for thoughts with respect to their environments and then demonstrates how truth and usefulness are two distinct properties of thoughts but are probabilistically positively correlated in normal environments. Section 4.3 then discusses some social phenomena about thoughts, including thought individuation, the public meaning of a sentence, and propositions in the traditional sense. Sections 4.4 and 4.5 apply this model to characterize belief ascription and analyticity respectively. Finally, Sect. 4.6 will use the model to give an account of modality. It will include an interpretation of Kripke’s metaphysical modality and show that metaphysically necessary but a posteriori truths are of the same nature as physically necessary but a posteriori truths (and are therefore nothing surprising). All these show that No-Self Physicalism can offer many new insights into issues in philosophy of language.
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Notes
- 1.
This refers to the so-called unification problem in naturalizing representation.
- 2.
See Sun (2008) for surveys on some cognitive architectures proposed by contemporary cognitive scientists. They are all high-level architectures and are no-less speculative than what are said here.
- 3.
This subsection is a revised version of Ye (2011).
- 4.
See Quine’s well-known criticism on the analytic-synthetic distinction in Quine (1951).
- 5.
I am not suggesting that this was what happened historically. This is merely a thought experiment. This puzzle also comes from a well-known criticism on the analytic-synthetic distinction made by Quine (1951).
- 6.
This is another criticism of Quine’s. See Quine (1951).
- 7.
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Ye, F. (2023). Thoughts and Truth. In: Studies in No-Self Physicalism. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8143-2_4
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